Proposal + Next steps + Hurdles

Based on the in-class brainstorming assignment, I’ve decided a few things. Firstly, the issue of ‘climate science’ is large and I need to tackle just one aspect that is interesting to me. Three example sub-topics:
1) Just one story – like the Exxon Mobile Hiding Climate Data story
2) The history of United Nations agreements (Kyoto Protocol etc)
3) a personal story that has a sci-fi theme to it. (?) Put user in the place of a farmer or something.
4) Data driven extrapolation of stats – Where will we be in 2200?

Project Proposal (at least what I know): My project ‘Cli-fi’ (amalgamation of ‘climate change’ and ‘science fiction’) is an interactive online webGL story about climate science. My goals are for the user to gain knowledge from the piece and feel compelled to share it. On a personal level, I’m interested in crowd sourcing information and in working on my webGL animation skills.

Next steps / Need to learn and concept:

CROWDSOURCING SKILLS NEEDED: Learn how to gather and store data from users and keep it in a server. Learn to scrape data from the internet. I think I need to learn how to make chrome extensions, based on the idea below.

STORY – What is my story? A bit stalled out right now. I’ve brainstormed this in so many directions this week but a bit lost on how to choose. I am starting to like this Exxon Mobile story.

Actual Ideas:

Recreation of the Exxon Mobile scandal. The user is guided through an online investigation of what happened at Exxon. This would be done with a chrome extension so I could know where on each page they are. Loose first draft of a script below

3D world that is a ‘Web of climate science players’ – more about navigating a space and showing the lines between countries and companies, and also graphing it on time. Keeping it simple and small though. Image below and example data of simple timeline.

Really love this intro, if I can get webcam images to work, per person who has visited the site

Exxon Mobile script:

(Last semester I made this project about myself. This new project will have a similar format, EXCEPT this time, i’m going to pipe in real data and allow the player to connect their twitter/fb or something. Here’s one version of the narrative)

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Player enters the site (the 3D world) and is in a post-apocalyptic outdoor space with a desk. You’re given an assignment — to document what happened with case #147 – “Exxon Mobile vs. Human Race”.

You open a manilla envelope and there are instructions. You must complete them all to add to the ‘Database of Human Error’ (this is supposed to be some joke that if narrated could have lots of echo :))

1) The synopsis of the case is missing the ’TL:DR’. You are directed to a wikipedia page where you have to read, and then paraphrase the TL:DR into 160 characters with #exxon_vs_humanity, tweet it out, and then you will be redirected back to your desk, with that tweet now populated in the file and of course in your twitter feed.

2) Players headshot missing. You have to find images of the people who are in charge of exxon and upload them to missing photos in the document

3) Fill in the missing stats in this chart (the chart is 3D, and if they fill in the right numbers, then the chart animates to look correct.

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last step) Add yourself to the team: Using a pic from the webcam, something like this would be rad